I tried installing Open Office 3 and it would not run. It kept saying something about not finding the expected i386 architecture when I tried to install in terminal. However the Intel Atom is an x86 processor so it should work. It boogered the system up so bad that I restored it back to factory fresh. This install came with Open Office 2.4. It has only 3 of the apps installed. When I try to install the full version I get the same problem. The problem seems to stem mostly from the database application. I don't need the app right now but it would be great to get it working. So does anyone have any ideas? Or maybe a different Office type suite that will run on Ubuntu 8.04 that can deal with the docx format now out in MS Office?

Could you please provide the info about the medium you used to install Ubuntu 8.04LTS, in case I need to reproduce the issue locally. It would also help if you could quote the exact error message here.

Intel Atom is a regular x86, so this may be be due to a bug in installation script.

You may also want to install Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix as it comes with OpenOffice 3 preinstalled. Any special reasons behind the usage of 8.04 LTS?

This is a long-standing problem with the version of Ubuntu Dell installs. In fact it was the #1 reason why I dumped it from my Mini 9. The cause of the problem is that the Dell version of Ubuntu has been compiled with the lpia architecture (Low Power Intel Architecture) flag, which Synaptics thinks isn't compatible with i386 packages and therefore won't install them.

You've got a few options. If you want to stick with this version of Ubuntu, this thread outlines how you can get around the lpia mess. However, I would suggest moving to an i386 version of Ubuntu or another distro altogether. Neither Dell nor Canonical seem to support lpia very well, so you'll run into this often.

Thanks for your post! I will definitely try it. I don't want to nuke 8.04 yet because its got the dell drivers and the elantech junk for the touchpad on it. LOL! I'll give it a shot and I'll let you know if I have success with it. If not, I'll download the version 9 off of the Ubuntu website and install that instead. Do you happen to know if the Elantech drivers are available for downlaod for v9?

To be honest, I don't know. I've just been using the usual Synaptic drivers for my touchpad and it has worked fine. The only driver I worry about is the Broadcom driver for the wireless card and that is readily available from Broadcom and I think it is on several *buntu repositories. You might also do some searching at the mydellmini forums. I've found that site to be pretty useful.

Awesome! Thank you so much!

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Installing one version of openoffice on top of another is fraught with problems. I had to customize my Fedora installs by not installing the OpenOffice that came with Fedora Core 10 and then installing OpenOffice 3.1 afterwards. Your problem may be that the OpenOffice you are trying to install doesn't like the OpenOffice already there.

Once installed, there is a .docx converter/integrator program that is separate from OpenOffice that you can download and install. OpenOffice 3.0 does not read .docx files natively. I can't remember if OpenOffice 3.1 does or not. Nifty separate app you can get from OpenOffice web site solves that problem.

Also, I seem to recall that OpenOffice 3.0 had a security flaw, fixed in 3.1.